09/15/14 – Thomas Harrington – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here.
I want to tell you about this great new book, Live in La Vida Baroca, American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies by Thomas Harrington.
While he comes from the left, Harrington has little time for much of what is passed off under that label today.
Like us libertarians, he puts peace and freedom first.
The book's got great essays on American fascism, empire, the Israeli occupation, the left and Obama, liberalism in the state, and some interesting lessons from the history of imperial Spain.
Live in La Vida Baroca by Thomas Harrington.
Check it out at scotthorton.org slash books or scotthorton.org slash amazon.
Okay guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Here noon to three eastern time on Liberty Radio Network.
My archives are at scotthorton.org and you can follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow and things like that.
All right, good.
First guest today is Thomas Harrington and he is the author of this book, Live in La Vida Baroca.
He's the new sponsor of the show, but he's a regular writer for, well, not a regular writer, but well, yeah, I don't know.
We feature him pretty damn regularly at antiwar.com.
I don't know what you call that.
He also writes for counterpunch.org from time to time.
It's a really great book.
It's Live in La Vida Baroca and the subtitle is American Culture in a Time of Imperial Orthodoxies.
Just go to scotthorton.org slash books and it's right there at the upper left.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
Very well, Scott.
Very nice to be here with you.
Very good to have you on the show.
Very good to do business with you too.
Very happy to represent your work and try to convince people to buy it.
I think everyone will enjoy it a lot.
One of the things I like about it, certainly unique to me, is obviously you're an American and so all your writing is about the American empire, this and that.
I'm not sure exactly what your connection is to Spain.
Apparently, you live there some of the time or something.
Maybe you can tell us about that, but then you have all this great stuff to say about Spanish history and all these great analogies and metaphors and lessons to be learned and all this great stuff.
Really unique book and very good.
I'm very happy to have the association.
In fact, let's start with that.
What is exactly your connection to Spain, sir?
Well, in my day job, I'm a professor of Hispanic Studies up at Trinity College in Hartford.
I kind of was just a typical American kid from New England who one day marched into Spain and said, this is a great place, and it became an obsession and eventually went back and became a professor, did a whole PhD in that route, and I'm a researcher in contemporary Spain and especially nationalisms within Spain today.
And that got me thinking over a number of years about the whole issue of Spain as a great empire.
It tends to be the empire that we don't talk about, although in some ways it's the empire that's most comparable to what we are now.
And so over a number of years, I've been reflecting upon Spain's imperial trajectory, and as I live in today's America, I begin to see more and more correspondences between them.
Yeah, well, as William Graham Sumner said, he described America's victory against Spain in the Spanish-American War as their conquest of us as we replace them in the scheme of things and in European powers, finally knocking them out of the way, but corrupting what America was supposed to be about by going down that path.
I think that's very clearly so.
I happened to be glancing last night at the new Roosevelt documentary on PBS, and of course, Teddy Roosevelt was a driver behind that imperial push of the late 1800s, early 1900s.
And really, I think you could make a very strong argument that that's the beginning of the denaturing of the American democratic project as it became involved with empire, and quite frankly so.
Although we don't always use the words, we've gone in and out on it.
We don't like to talk about ourselves as imperial, but we're clearly imperial.
And that was a turning point, probably in the American project, and ironically, it was the ending blow to Spain's nearly 400-year role as a great imperial power.
Yeah, it's funny.
Nowadays, I think I've seen multiple examples of this where, say, college textbooks will have a chapter subheading, The Age of Empire, and it's just the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, whatever.
They're done in a few pages.
And that was the end of the American empire at that point.
Certainly, it was long over by World War I.
Well, yeah, and there's a parallel to that in European history.
In college, I studied European history, and during that time, I did the survey course that went from 1500 to the present.
And when I got involved with Hispanic studies later on, I said, gee, I don't remember hearing anything about Spain during that time.
1500 to the present, for the first 300 years of that, Spain was a huge imperial power.
In the first 150 years of that, it was the unquestioned imperial power of the world.
And yet, my textbooks told me everything about Britain and Germany, and I went back many years later and found that there were exactly two references to the standard textbook on European history on Spain, which was the most powerful country for a lot of that period.
You know, I think, well, back sort of to contemporary Spain, I think what you're saying there a couple of statements back was that Spain is still an empire, in a sense.
You have these different nationalisms, nationalities on the Iberian Peninsula.
I think this, I'm pretty sure that when I was a little kid, this is one of the very first things I learned about countries.
It seems strange to me that Portugal was not part of Spain, just looking at the map.
And why not?
Well, because they refused to rule from Madrid.
That's why.
Because Madrid was never successfully able to take over that part of the peninsula is all.
Kind of one of my, I don't know how young I was when that was first explained to me, but I guess I had a friend who had relationships, family relationships, going back to Portugal.
So it was brought up at a very young age.
And it just looks funny on the map, but really what we call Spain is a whole bunch of different regions kind of dominated by an imperial center in the way D.C. dominates Texas, California and the rest.
Even more so.
You're right on, Scott.
I mean, the freedom of Portugal is counterbalanced by the lack of freedom of Catalonia.
Kind of the imperial center in Spain has had the choice of being able to dominate one, but not the other.
They've never been able to dominate both of them.
But as you're saying, there's one thing I always talk to my students is there's an incongruence between the nation and the state in Spain.
Spain is a state of many nations.
It has Catalans, it has Basques, it has Galicians, and then it has Portuguese who've managed to create their own state in congruence with their ethnicity.
But generally speaking, we think that states and nations are congruent, and they're not in this case.
And you're right on when you talk about Spain is still thinking imperially.
One of the things that's going on, as some of your listeners will know, is that there's a big movement for independence in Catalonia right now.
And the way the Spanish center is responding is very similar to the way we respond to threats to what we see as our natural rights out there in the world.
We just discount any historical background, and we say, get back in your place, do your thing, go back to being the people we want you to be.
And so it's very interesting, even today that imperial mindset is very present in the Spanish press coming out of Madrid, and interestingly enough, in the liberal Spanish press.
So liberals are no better on this than so-called conservatives.
Both have a very clear imperial mindset when it comes to Catalonia and the other nations of Spain.
Well, so other than just the ability to exercise power, which is the ultimate end in itself, what interest does the central government really have in dominating, I mean, for example, I don't know so much about Catalonia these days, but the Basque have been even violently resisting for so long.
Why not just let them go?
What's the big deal?
They're sitting right on top of the copper mine, or what?
Well, there is an economic element that is very important.
Spain has the paradox of having its two most economically developed areas, Catalonia and the Basque country, the areas where a different language and culture exists.
So there is the economic focus, but I think it goes back deeper than that.
It goes back to the idea of, really, you can go into the Spanish Middle Ages and talk about the reconquest, which is the idea of expelling Jews and Arabs from the Iberian Peninsula where they had lived for 700 years, and this idea that you will be Catholic, you will speak one language, and that will be what it will mean to be Spanish.
And that mentality fed very nicely into an imperial mentality outside of the peninsula, and it was the imperial mentality inside the peninsula.
Here's the project.
Either you're with us or against us, and if you're not with us, well, we have the right to make sure that you are.
All right.
Very interesting stuff.
Hold it right there.
We're talking with Thomas Harrington.
He's the author of Livin' La Vida Baroca, American Culture in a Time of Imperial Orthodoxies, a great book of essays.
You can find it at scotthorton.org slash books, and we'll be back in just a second.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Thomas Harrington.
He's the author of Livin' La Vida Baroca, American Culture in a Time of Imperial Orthodoxies, and his book is now a sponsor of this show, so I will extra-definitely-double encourage you to go and buy it, scotthorton.org slash books.
I actually just got an email in the break there, Thomas, from Bill.
He says, went to Amazon through your book page.
It's only available from Spain.
I guess that's okay, but are there plans to publish it in the U.S. as well, he asks.
That's been a little problem of distribution we've had.
The Kindle version is very readily accessible.
There's another site called Book Depository, which will get it to you cheaper and pretty directly, and you can get it through a secondary distributor in Georgia who is listed on the website.
So it's been a little bit of back and forth that I've gone through with the publisher in Spain.
It's published in a series in English in Spain through the university press there, so we're working out some of those kinks.
But if you buy it from Spain...
You said that's bookdepository.com?
Pardon me?
Yes.
You said that's bookdepository.com, is that right?
Correct.
And that's something new to me that I just discovered the other day and found out...
What a great name for a bookstore website, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's an anomalous publication in that sense, but it's an American studies series that they do at the University of Valencia over there, and they're the ones that were most interested in it.
And tell me about this title.
Yeah, Baroque.
Obviously, I'm playing off the Ricky Martin song from a few years back.
I don't know if anyone remembers it any longer, but there was one summer where it was Livin' La Vida Loca, and I sat down there and I said, We're Livin' La Vida Baroque.
And of course, Baroque, it's Baroque.
What is Baroque?
We don't talk about...
We talk about Baroque music sometimes.
We talk about Baroque art.
But Baroque is really much more than just forms of art.
It's the form of aesthetics that came out of what is called the Counter-Reform, the Counter-Reformation, excuse me, in Spain.
And that was the time during the 16th century where Spain, as the greatest hegemonic power in the world, was faced with uprisings all across Europe, which is virtually controlled through the Habsburg Empire.
And those uprisings had to do with the Protestant Reformation.
And we always think of the Protestant Reformation as a religious movement, and it's portrayed to us as primarily a religious movement, which it was, of course.
But there was a strong geopolitical subtext to the religious movement.
Germans didn't want to be ruled by Spain.
Dutch didn't want to be ruled by Spain.
And what held them together, of course, was the Spanish monarchy held them under Spain was the Spanish monarchy in conjunction with the Catholic Church out of Rome, which Spain had an enormous control over.
So in effect, these Protestant uprisings were saying, we want our freedom.
We want to be able to look at our God in our way through our cultural point of view.
And that really was an uprising that lasted for a good hundred years, a series of wars in Europe that were very important.
And what's interesting to me is that the Spaniards, much like the Americans today, instead of looking at the grievances that people have against them across the world, the reasons why they might be angry with their rule, they say, no, the problem is you just need to understand, you just need to hear more and more ornately what we are, and you'll ultimately be convinced by what we are.
And we obviate the problem of the violence we visit on these people for all we try and visit on these people.
And that's what the Baroque was.
The Baroque was, in effect, the aesthetic that grew out of the Counter-Reformation, this propagandistic drive to bring Protestants back to the fold by convincing them about the beauty of the Catholic Church.
And the Jesuits were a big part of the Counter-Reformation.
So I see a lot of parallels there between our way of responding to the so-called threats we have.
I remember when Charlotte Beers was hired by the Bush administration to market the War on Terror to the Arabs, so we brought in someone from Madison Avenue and told them, we really do love you, even though we're making war against you.
Well, that's in effect what the Spaniards tried to do through the Counter-Reformation and led by the Jesuits.
No, really, really, Catholicism is good.
But it has another aspect to it that is real interesting, is that within Spain, when there's ideological strictures within a country, there's very little ability to express oneself directly.
And I think we see this here in the United States.
Oh, I support the troops, don't you?
And we're all supposed to get up and clap on cue, or we're supposed to support all of our uniformed people as if they were all heroes.
You go to a ballgame, and I don't want to go to a ballgame and I want to watch the ballgame, but I have to support someone's idea of who heroes are.
There's these implied ideological obligations we have, and what people find after a while is that they tire of doing that, and they begin to not direct criticisms toward them, and they begin to seek refuge in ornateness, misdirection plays, all of the fluff that we now celebrate in our media.
And that's very Baroque to me, because that's what the Spanish Baroque did.
This poetry sought ornamentation, so as not to have to run into the problems of the ideological restrictions that existed in the society.
I see.
Well, first of all, it's really interesting about the culture of Spain during that Counter-Reformation period, and that that's the way they reacted.
And then the parallel, of course, is pretty plain.
It sounds like, even if it's not necessarily always getting down to such, you know, how many angels can dance on a head of a pin kind of questions, it's still always just irrelevancies.
It's still always just a refusal to ask and answer the real questions about what the hell the situation is.
Exactly.
We see this especially in foreign policy where, I mean, a lot of times anyway, I live in Austin, what the hell do I know about D.C.?
But it sure seems to me like a lot of times these people lie, and they know they're lying, and they turn right around and believe their own damn lie and base their policy on the narrative that they were trying to construct to fool you and me, and they end up fooling themselves with it and go ahead and make the most horrible mistakes based on what they knew wasn't right in the first place, you know?
Well, and this is one of the, you probably saw in the book, one of my pet peeves is how people who are given the luxury, like I have been given, of being able to spend time reading books and studying and traveling, it's incumbent upon us to ask hard questions, and oftentimes we don't.
Last night I was with a couple of friends, both professors, and we were talking about the problem in the Ukraine.
And these are very bright people who've traveled, read in other languages, et cetera.
Not that that's proof of anything, but it certainly helps in gaining perspective.
And they could not dislodge their minds from the narrative of Putin's evilness, even when I was trying to point out very salient facts about what Putin has done and hasn't done, the things that Ray McGovern talks about in your program.
The ability of the narrative to overwhelm even the people that are supposed to be the guardians on some level or another of educated discourse, it's incredible.
And that, again, was similar during the Spanish Golden Age.
An empire, above all, needs narratives to keep people in line.
And we're finding that the media, as it exists, does a very, very, very good job of that.
And people aren't asking the right questions about it.
Right.
Well, as that veteran of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell, wrote in 1984, the propaganda is mostly for the powerful anyway, right?
Because the proles, us regular folks, what we say and think doesn't matter anyway.
So you can watch football, you can smoke cigarettes or do whatever you want.
But the party people are the ones who have to be most indoctrinated in all the cheerleading.
I think back to, well, and I know that partisanship has a lot to do with this too, of course, but the run up to the Iraq War, where they announced a year and a half in advance, we're going to lie you into war for the next year and a half, and then we're going to start a war.
And so we had not just every chance, we had more than every chance, all of us to know better and to disallow it.
And it was the, you know, I mean, and I was driving a cab at the time, so I got the perfect kind of random sample of everybody.
And it's the doctors and the lawyers and the well-educated and the know-it-alls who know nothing.
And, you know, they're the ones who are most impressionable when it comes to what all us smart people know and think, right guys, kind of crap.
You know, they're ridiculous, basically.
And, you know, I've had conversations with people who make, you know, who have millions of dollars on giant businesses, you know, are, you know, surgeons or whatever.
And they're complete dimwits.
They know nothing other than, you know, cheer for the fascist state.
It's ridiculous.
It's crazy.
I just said ridiculous twice.
Sorry.
But it is.
It's too silly to be crazy.
No, you're making a hugely important point, Scott.
And, believe it or not, there's another, I look at the way national identities are formed in Spain in the contemporary era.
And what's interesting, and you put your hand on it, your hand in the fire on it, is that national identities can even be formed by a very compact, small group of people and then sold to the rest of the populace.
And this is what I think is one of the most disturbing things of our time.
People think, well, there's more information than ever, there's more ability of people to have the, to understand the world than ever.
And there's this idea that large narratives of the powerful few have been broken down.
I would argue it's just the opposite.
The ability of small groups of people to propagate their narratives and have them believed is greater than ever.
And the people who are supposed to be doing the job of criticizing them are asleep at the wheel.
And that gets, I think one of the real dangers is the gap between the ability to manipulate from on high and the ability of people to critically pull those discourses apart is bigger than it's ever been.
And they can just generate realities, and people, for the most part, buy them.
And then you look at people who might listen to dissident voices and say, you're kooky.
Right.
Yeah, no, it's such an important point.
We should never forget that all these technologies, as wonderful as they are for as many reasons as they are, they've all been subsidized by the U.S. state this whole time for a very important reason, enslaving mankind.
And at best, what we have is their double-edged sword that we can try to use against them, you know, back against them.
That's what this show is, right?
It's their Internet, and I'm trying to, you know, at least have my say to try to push back my millionth of one percent for whatever it's worth, you know?
And you know, that's what you're doing with your writing and all of this.
But it's their technology, and it was created for exactly the purposes that you say.
I mean, other than just tracking us like packages everywhere we go, but also for, you know, reaching into every nook and cranny of our brain, you know?
I think they've made a...
I think it's a new paradigm that we've been sort of awakened to, that they've made a very clear calculation.
Let anyone find the information they want anywhere, if they have the ability to do it.
But in the meantime, we will flood them with such nonsense and such indiscriminate types of information that only very few people with a lot of stamina or a lot of time on their hands or whatever will actually clue themselves in.
And so it's a very interesting system in that it doesn't have to restrict people with a heavy hand the way they had to do it in East Germany.
They let everything be out there, and yet emphases are still being controlled by who wants to control them.
And we can sit on the margins, and we can find out a lot of things, and yet our ability to generate an echo out of what we know is fairly limited.
Yeah.
Hey, at least we get to say, I told you so, all the time, which only irritates people more.
I know it.
Hey, listen, we're over time, and the live audience isn't even getting to hear this part, so I better let you go now, and the archive will be up, everyone will be able to hear the whole thing.
And then, you know, let's do this regularly for the next little while, until I'm done questioning you about all the great stuff you wrote in this book here.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
It's been a pleasure.
All right.
Thank you very much, Tom.
Talk to you soon.
Okay.
Bye.
All right.
So that's Thomas Harrington.
The book is Livin' La Vida Baroca, American Culture in a Time of Imperial Orthodoxies.
It's really great.
It's at scotthorton.org slash books.
Go and help support.
Thanks very much.
We'll be right back.
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